Jon Wilkins

Hi all. This is my second year teaching at the Beijing summer school. Hopefully, this year's students will benefit from all that went wrong last year. I will be giving three lectures in the first week. The first one, on Monday, July 9, will be an introduction to population genetics and coalescent theory. The second lecture, on Wednesday, will introduce genomic imprinting, and I will talk some about how the choice of a mathematical modeling framework affects the nature of the inferences that you draw from your research. In my final lecture, on Friday, I will talk a bit about the problem of making statistical inferences in complex system, and I will introduce a technique known as "Approximate Bayesian Computation," which has been developed in populaiton genetics, but which can be applied in other areas as well.